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Dionysius symbolizes a masculine figure and the father's genitals (represented by Zeus) and the gratifying but competitive mother. His myth resembles that of the birth of the hero (a God who is also a son of Man). It represents incest, the primitive crime (murder of the father), the fantasied retaliation for this crime, the triumphal, orgiastic feelings of the leader (the brother), and the attempted return to maternal hegemony.
Dionysian rituals represent a dramatization of several unconscious fantasies: the triumph of a phallic woman (Bacchante); castration of the male (sacrifice of the bull); homosexual submission to the father; and celebration of coitus of mother and son in mimicry of the primal scene. The manic denial also has hypochondriacal aspects: it denies the woman's phallus as dangerous to her body, it denies the birth of the child associated with the mother's destruction, disfigurement, and death. The rituals also represent an expiatory sacrifice, a totem repast, the feast of reparation and appeasement of the father, and Dionysius as the trinity,—the father, the son, and stolen penis of the father.